The Hermetic Millennia (43 page)

“Talk ’em to death, do you?”

“I am a Kine and I don’t mind. You Chimerae can do sheepdoggery drudgery, and I’ll run in the herd! But I was in uniform back in the day. I’ve served in private security and public unrest, spook and mook, and twelve years in Intelligence Command out of Kang Key, Eighth Division. You know Alpha Captain Stheno Alleret Anju of First and Second Bull Run? Family springs from a cadet mutation of the Anjusri Line, and I think that his kin got some tiger in their cocktail. I served under him, and he had me cleaning toilets in the stockade for a month. Served under his daughter, too, but not in the same capacity, and when the Chastity Police found out, I discovered scientifically that you can fit a five-foot-two-inch man through a foot-and-a-half-square window overlooking a three-story drop in two seconds, and there is nothing in your pants you really need to go back for, but some things it might be smarter to keep in your pants. Got me?”

Menelaus looked at the ceiling again and sighed again, and spoke in a monotonic drone. “You come from an era when the number of persons volunteering or being selected for long-term hibernation is statistically anomalous. As a native of that time, and an eyewitness, do you have any personal theories backed by evidence you’d care to describe, concerning the cause of this anomaly?”

“Lance-Corporal, you’re chewing my scrotum, right? That’s why you guys thawed me?”

Menelaus jerked his eyes down from the ceiling and laughed scornfully. “Lepers and scabs! You think I am dithering you?
Me?
Look what is talking! Shut your yap and open your ears, yammermouth! Look around you! We’re prisoners. The Blue Men are in charge, and they plan to kill us as soon as they get what they want. So smarten up and eyes front, Kine, if you want to see the end of the week. Whatever is happening is about to happen fast. You want to sober up, and talk without so much vinous crapulent goldbricking flummoxery?”

The man’s face fell. He spoke in a slow and serious tone. “So … we are in a deep hole, are we, Lance-Corporal?”

“Six feet deep and there to stay, safe behind wooden walls, unless we find a way to climb out. If you have a God you don’t believe in, start cursing him now.”

“Might die soon?”

“More than likely.”

“Then, um—those jewels and stuff you pulled off the dwarf’s coat? Guy who’s about to die don’t need ’em, so I’d be doing you a favor, taking them off your hands, check? They worth anything?”

Menelaus turned to Illiance and said in Iatric, “The man knows nothing of value.”

Illiance said, “Inquire of him concerning the other questions alluring us. Ask of the Tombs, and their architect, and of the Judge of Ages, if he has heard of him.”

Menelaus translated the question.

Larz Quire leaned back in his chair and spread his legs and let out a gush of laughter. “Hoo, boy! Did you ever find the right guy! The Judge of Ages? Heard of him! I used to work for him! I know everything there is to know about him! He might forget, but he hired me once. I bet you I could sit right in front of him, talking his ear off, and he’d never think about me. Never notices little people! That’s the kind of guy he is. No fun to work for, and we did not part on exactly friendly terms, no, sir! So I’ll tell you everything!

“His real name is Menelaus Montrose.”

4. The Name of the Judge

What! You did not think his family name was
Judge,
first name
The,
and that he proved himself in a battle called
Ages
did you? Nope, this is a real person, a real man, not a god or a demigod like the lying Witches say, and he invented the long-term hibernation process—and the first person he used it on was himself.

Why? Pass around some of this dandy hooch, gather round, round up your ears, and I’ll tell you the why and the wherefore and the who and the how and the how much it cost ’em!

He was born in Texas back before the days of fire, in
AUCR
473 by the soldier calendar, but that would be
A.D.
2210 by the civilian calendar. It was a little town called Nowhere, and the name suited. He had a dozen brothers, one mother, no father, and his sweetheart was a Princess of Monaco who was also the Captain of the White Ship.

Yes,
that
White Ship, the ship with silver star-sails, the one and only human-crewed interstellar vessel this poor planet ever produced, and that ship is real, and it’s coming back someday.

The Chimeras say that she was the first Chimera, the first artificial
Homo sap
created from Monument code, but I don’t believe it. I don’t think she was two genetic lines crosspatched together like
they
are. She was more than them. She was an Odd John, a Nietzsche-man, a Next, an Ugly Duckling meant to grow into something finer. A Swan!

Y’understand, this Menelaus Montrose was a bit of a Next himself, because he hackled on his own brain to bloom his intelligence, and at one point he ruled the world, and he had a monopoly on the world energy supply. He had everything, and it meant nothing.

So he was smart, and powerful, and rich, and all meant jakeswash to him, because his Swan Princess took the world’s one and only starship, and her one and only self, and she was called away to the stars to plead for the human race in the court of an Authority beyond the rim of the Milky Way, and she ain’t coming back no time soon.

I’m telling you this so you’ll understand his mind. Tom needs his pussycat, and bull needs his cow and a boar needs his sow, so you see where I am heading with this? Here is this bloke with the fattest brain and the richest poke the world’s ever known, and he is carrying a tentpole in his trousers for his chip, and any man stands in his way, stands under the treads of an avalanche.

Man could do most anything by himself, that’s the kind of cove he is, but when he woke up in a strange world, and he needed a fix, he came to find a fixer, and the one he found was me.

5. The Final Fix

So I was hired to do this fix for him, see? It was my last job. My final.

Not that hard, not for a man of my talents and tie-ins, but it had to be smooth and it had to be hush, and he, when he said secret, he meant tight as the lid of a napalm can. Airtight. But all it was, was a slip-and-slide job, just moonshining past the shore patrol, avoid the deepers, and go: no other package than one passenger. Him.
He
was the flash stash I had to pass without fuss or fash, and my fix was to glide him out of Norfolk without tripping over the watchdog’s nose.

It was December of 5884 when I first clapped eye on him. So you figure he is over three thousand years old, but he spent the years in the Witches’ Tombs, where they are frozen, and they freeze time—but you knew that part! So he is looking good. Armed to the teeth. Not only has he got a knife in either sleeve, a shiv in his glove, and a springwhip as a belt with a heater for a buckle, a matched set of hissers tucked into it, but he is also carrying not one but two powder pieces bigger than the sprong of a whale in heat: each one was a hogleg hand-cannon like the breed you only read in history books, and only if you take the time to read. Each was a rocket-launcher, I kid you not, shot eight autogyro missiles in one go, and blew chaff and camo to paint the air. I saw it work!

There is nothing like it these days—I mean, my days.

Those days. His smokewagon was from the ancient world, before the Thinking Machines, before the Giants and their augmented brains, before the Witchwives and their expanded lives. Those Americans were one gun-happy crew, and this gunner was their happiest, I tell you.

Why does a man pay top dollar, hard cash up front, to haul himself and his boom-finger all the way across the gray Atlantic, stealth at night and submerge by day, using a low-flow cold drive? To kill someone, of course!

Because I had friends and contacts among shippers and smugglers, including some hired muscle with really illegal modifications—when I say illegal, I mean
capital penalty, family-out-to-the-cousins, them first, and you watch ’em scream
–type illegal—he sought me out. He was introduced to me by the Lotus King, who was the head of a nest of Greencloaks, drop-outs, off-the-books and off-the-wire types, but with glands for adrenaline-boosters, amphetamines, alcohol, opiates, painkillers.

I don’t know if you still have Greencloaks these days, but they were a cult of rejectionists. They turned their back on Darwin, turned their back on improving the race, turned their back on the End of Days, the whole roast pig, apple to arse, they flung it and said
no-thank’ee
. What did they care what the ultimate fate of the race that replaced mankind would be by
A.D.
Eleven Thou? Let the dead bury the dead, they said, live for the moment, and let the unborn worry about the not-yet. So as you can imagine, they were a bunch of petty crooks, glandular and hookweasels, and they supported their high-minded orgies with low-level crime.

Now, I seen you have some Greencloaks working in your infirmary and slopping slops in the cook-tent, and dithering anyone who’ll toke up with a puffball or two: right spicy harlots ready-eddy to spready? So I hear these AWOLs took over the whole damn planet, the whole snotball we call Third from Sol, and I tell you I am not surprised. Nope, not by a hair, because I saw it all and I were there! I was there when the Judge of Ages condemned the Chimeras and all their way of life to the recycling abattoir. He killed the greatest civilization history has ever known, to make way for a bunch of dunderbrains and sloshers to take over. Don’t ask me why, but you should ask if he’s planning to do the same right now to you!

You asked about the spike in the slumbering pop? It was all we talked about, all the bulletins carried. Why are so many Kine deserting, why are Chimerae wounding themselves to get a medical slip, and take the sleep? Everyone knew why. Because we could.

Y’see having Hibernation tech around, it changes people. Hell, I could see the white horse drawn in chalk on the hill outside my first-ever overseas station. And there was a statue of a man on a white horse right near the Sisters of Bon Secours hospital. People see these things, and they read kiddie yarns about adventures in space, and they get to thinking, why live through another war, another plague, another famine, and another round of population cuts or slave demotions? Why not just snooze through it?

Bye-bye world and worldly sorrow, hello world and new tomorrow. Y’see?

Hell, that’s why I entered the Tombs. One short nap fixes everything.

6. The Stealthboat

Like I said, Menelaus Montrose is armed to the nines and he comes to where the Lotus King is holding court, hiding out in a warehouse in an abandoned area near the waterfront. Montrose spread out these plans, describing a certain type of submersible boat he wants built, based on a principle of propulsion from the days before the fire. It calls for third-generation precision machine tools of a type that have to be built first from second-generation tools that have to be built from tools we can buy on the sly or pilfer. Money is no object: he threw down a bag of gold, doubloons from the Witch-days, lozenges and emeralds from the Giants, and microbrains like beads, each one worth a fortune, he scattered on the floor like musket balls from a kid’s game. Some of the components for the vessel he has on him, stealth counteremission technology, such as no one knows how to make, and some of the substances, he has the formula but not the raw materials, and he has to teach our blackout techs how to make it.

The Lotus King knew everyone in town, and he knew their kids’ birthdays and name days, and he knew which locks were left open, and which could be broke open without alerting the Chimerae. The boat was done in three months, we used it in a shake-down cruise, and to shoot up a pest or two, maybe trim back a long nose, before we knew it was ready, and the Lotus King sent for the Judge of Ages. That’s when he said all he wanted was a trip across the Atlantic, but he also wanted some musclers and some rustlers, fist and fingers. A break-in, y’understand?

7. The Gang

My gang was good for both and all, and that and more.

It was me, and my partner Brick of Back-alley, a razorgirl named Sugar-n-Slice, a brute born Obu Nobunagato, but we called him Oh-No, because he was modified for wrestling and he was as thick as he was tall and twice as dumb. Last was a snake-charmer named Hesperonado, who doubled as our brain-man, so he was natural to pilot the stealthboat.

This boat was a dream of a dream! Streamlined like a teardrop torpedo, the upper half one solid shell of some transparent material Montrose made, the thing rode on a hydrofoil shaped like a ring and had one long leg trailing aft to a pontoon. The engine had no moving parts: it ionized the water around it and magnetically accelerated a submerged stream of sea behind it. Now, I know you have heard of caterpillar drives before, and you say they are too noisy, but I am telling you this guy solved the problem of acceleration without turbulence. You sat in the vessel, and the water was like an endless gray white blanket being yanked backwards, and there was almost no sensation of motion. So smooth and fast, it was scary.

The vessel had an onboard brain that was nervous as a rabbit, and when she sensed anything out of the ordinary pattern, she cut power and submerged. And we knew when the Cities in Space were up, because that’s not the kind of thing you can hide, and we followed under the clouds as much as we could.

Well, we all pretty much hated each other to pieces by the time we made it to the cold part of the world. The Judge of Ages didn’t talk much. Didn’t talk at all, in fact, except to give orders, and since the boat mostly piloted herself, he didn’t give many of those. See, his mind was already on the year
A.D.
70000—when his bride comes back, and so we were already dead and gone like the Neanderthals as far as he was concerned.

8. Streetlaw Larz on the Isle of Fear

Fear Island is best defended place I ever saw.

There was a ring of buoys around the whole island, and cables running along the ring, and listening towers buried in the sea, and watching towers on the rocks, and helicopters in the air, and boat patrols, and guard dogs, and—hell, there might have been guard fishes for all I knew. Then there were black walls of that reflex armor the Chimerae put on everything, pillboxes and lookout-shoot-out periscopes, and bright red boxes with lead-eyed radiation lamps, for giving anything organic a dose of lethal roentgens if the lamp blinked wide its eye.